I'd Never Have Known
by IShouldBeOverThis
Summary: My "Empty House" story. I started it ages ago and abandoned it because it wasn't going anywhere new and there are too many out there, but I'd written more of it than I thought, so might as well post tonight. Follow up on the last bit of If I Never


John's in the consulting room of the surgery. A hunched old man hobbles in complaining of a pronounced pain in his chest. John turns to get a fresh pair of gloves and when he turns back Sherlock's standing there. It's been three years. John shudders, sits down and puts his head between his knees. He thinks he might be sick. Or he might cry. Or he might punch Sherlock in the jaw. Or all three. Sherlock sinks down next to the chair, "John," he says in his low, rich voice. John looks up and Sherlock's face is covered in tears. Their faces are much too close together. There's the tiniest flicker of eyes—distances measured, angles calculated—and Sherlock's pressing his lips against John's. Sherlock's kiss is uncertain and tender. John's is angry but unrelenting. He pulls away first, "You bastard," he whispers. He means it but they both know it doesn't matter.

For several long, slow breaths they just rest, foreheads together. Sherlock smells a little stale, possibly from the disguise he was wearing, but John almost fancies it's the smell of exile. John's cheeks are wet and he's not sure whose tears they are.

"I have to see…patients."

"I know. Did you change the locks?"

For a moment, John's not even sure what Sherlock is talking about. "Oh. No. I didn't change anything."

Sherlock tries to joke. "I suppose you should call Mrs. Hudson and warn her so she doesn't faint."

"Sherlock, she died."

Sherlock's face crumples for a moment. A silent curse on his lips.

"Mycroft never said. How?"

"Ovarian cancer, it was sudden and it was fast. She left us the building. You and me together. At first I thought that she must not have changed her will, but I think she never gave up hope.

"Wait, Mycroft knew?" John feels an ice spike of fury. It shouldn't be a surprise. They are brothers, for God's sake, and Sherlock probably needed Mycroft's resources wherever he was, but if Mycroft could be trusted with the secret, then why couldn't he?

Sherlock sighs. Pulls away to stand up and John can hear knees crack. Wherever he's been it's aged him more than three years. If he seemed younger than his age before, now he seems older, not so much in appearance, although there are more lines, the eyes a little darker and more recessed, but in spirit.

"Later, John, I'll explain everything later. At home."

"You'll be there?"

"Yes. I'll be there when you get home. I promise. John…later. Everything later."

"Do you need my key?"

In response Sherlock pulls a chain from around his neck. It's the 221b key. John is hit hard by this unsentimental but significant memento that Sherlock has kept all this time.

John says, "I've let 221a and c before, but there's no one there now. Just me." Just me, entombed in your memory, he thinks.

Sherlock nods, brushes off his tears and leaves. John wonders if anyone even notices that it's a different person coming out than went in.

John isn't sure if he tells every afternoon patient he sees to go home and take paracetemol or that they're dying. His ears are full of cotton wool, and his view is narrowed down to a tunnel.

At last he's taking the tube home. At the doorway he pauses. He won't be there, he thinks. It was an illusion. He lied and he's gone again. He wanted to be there but something new happened.

He climbs the stairs and the door is open, just like old times. And Sherlock is on the couch as if no time at all has passed. Sherlock stands and they face each other fully for the first time. Sherlock takes in John's worn look, how he's faded. The Afghani tan was long gone, but there was always a warm glow to his skin. Now he's grey, just grey. "John," he says, trying to convey so many things in one broken name. Three years of lost things and given-up things. Things that were almost there before he left and have grown strange and twisted in the intervening years.

He doesn't know what else to do. He knows what he wants to do, of course. Which is press John against the wall and just hold him there, like the tether rope he always was. Instead he simply opens his arms and lets John come to him.

John comes, as timidly as a starving feral creature, fearful and needy in equal measure, until they are as tight into each other's space as they can be and yet not be intimate.

"I thought of you every moment. Everything I did I did for you. To keep you safe."

"Don't," John replies. "You didn't think of me every moment. It's not possible. Your precision is slipping." The tone is chiding and sad, and yet, in the subtlest of notes, there, just there at the end, is the hint of the old John, the one who giggled at crime scenes and made jokes after escaping death.

They reach for each other then, simultaneously it seems, but perhaps that is only the way it feels, hands reaching for faces, locking them together, and their mouths collide, a hot closed-mouth pressure. They adjust, arms going around each other, gripping too tight, holding up and being held up.

This, thinks John, it was never not this from the very beginning. He's thinking of half-remembered half-denied dreams about long, pale arms wrapped around him, moving beneath him and he wants, God he wants. But he pulls away, half an arm's length that might as well be across the room. It needs to be said. It's one of the hardest things he's ever needed to say, almost as hard as the words he had to say standing by Sherlock's crypt.

With Mycroft.

Remembering that Mycroft knew all along or at least part of the time brings his anger back and he's able to pull away completely.

"No. Not this."

Sherlock's eyes are grief stricken and then despairing. If not this, he thinks, then what was it for? All the sacrifice, the loneliness? If he's lost John in saving him.

"Please, John. Please, even if it's over and you kick me out after. Please, let me have this to hold onto." He's begging and it's alien on his tongue.

"Let you have this?" cries John. "What did I have to hold onto? I hurt, Sherlock! I HURT. Me, not you. I thought you were dead! I thought I'd let you die."


End file.
